Boys can be men. Men are respectful. Boys at times are not.

An accidental TikTok career

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming Ayla Adnan to the studio after a flight in from Karachi and asking the obvious question: how did she end up with a following on TikTok in the first place, on an app whose Pakistani For You page he himself has tried and quietly abandoned?

Ayla’s answer is disarmingly direct. There was no plan. “It was just, like, random videos I was putting up, like, if it was in my camera roll. And some started to do well, and there was no thought behind, like, why they were doing well.” A dance trend she had seen out of America, a four-second clip with a friend, a camera roll that became a posting schedule. The YouTube channel followed for the same reason — she had time in quarantine, she liked editing on her sofa for nine hours straight, and the algorithm was rewarding her.

The more interesting detail is how she ended up consuming a different TikTok than the one most Pakistanis see. She joined in 2019, before the platform’s official Pakistan rollout, and her For You page was seeded by the international aesthetic-and-dance creators she already followed. When TikTok formally entered the country, her feed flipped. “Now my For You page is all Gen Z Pakistanis on TikTok,” she tells Muzamil. The same private-school peers who had once messaged her asking why she was even on the app are now, she notes, making videos themselves.

The cost of going viral as a woman in Pakistan

Muzamil presses on the demographics of her early virality. Was the audience the same private-school silo she came from, or was it the masses? Ayla puts the split at 60-40 — sixty percent masses, forty percent her own circle — and the comments told her exactly which side of the split she had landed in.

“The one comment that would always then come on my videos, even if I’m wearing Eastern or Western clothes — Muslim, question mark.” She is matter-of-fact about it. She went through the comments, she laughed at them, she did not let them in. The friends she grew up with were a more complicated problem. Their indirect discouragement — the why-are-you-on-this-app messages — knocked her confidence enough that she paused posting for a stretch. Watching the same girls eventually swipe their way into the app and start making content themselves is, in her telling, less a vindication than a quiet observation about how quickly the goalposts moved.

YouTube she stopped for unromantic reasons: her laptop crashed, A-levels were ending, and Instagram did more with less effort. She would not outsource her editing — “you never know, even if it’s just, like, me making a fumble while talking” — and she misses the channel enough that her best friend Zara has been messaging her about it.

A non-typical home

Muzamil pivots to her upbringing, and the conversation slows down into one of its most considered sections. Ayla is an only child, born in Karachi, briefly schooled in Dubai, and back in Karachi after her parents divorced when she was in second grade. She lives with her mother and her nani. Her father comes by every weekend. There is no alternating-weeks custody arrangement, no resentment to manage. “My dad and I, we’re besties. My mom and I, we’re besties.”

What she says next is the part Muzamil flags as non-typical. Her parents have, as she has gotten older, sat down with her at the same level and spoken honestly about why they separated — irreconcilable differences, two people who were not meant to be together, no putting each other down. “I respect that I’m not treated like a bacha anymore.” She makes a broader point about Pakistani households out of it: kids are kept walled off from the financial situations, the domestic situations, the things adults are working through — and the wall produces exactly the snowball of negative emotions the wall was supposed to prevent.

Maturity, she argues, arrives early for kids who go through these experiences. Her mother and nani have both told her she matured well before her friends did, whether those friends’ parents were together or working through their own issues. She accepts the compliment without making it the whole story; she also notes that she was always the kind of child who liked doing things on her own, walking herself to school in Dubai at an age when most kids would not.

The grandmother who built the foundation

The figure who comes through most clearly in the conversation is Ayla’s nani. Her nana passed away when Ayla’s mother was nineteen. The grandmother was a housewife with four children and no income of her own, and she got all four educated and married. “Till this date, she is the definition of strength,” Ayla says. “You lose your husband, you have four kids, you have no sahara, and you do it yourself.”

The nani is also the source of Ayla’s instincts around money. The advice she gets is specific and unromantic — save aggressively, invest, do not wait on someone else to make the financial decisions for you. Muzamil sharpens the point: in a household where the women had to be financially independent because the alternative was collapse, financial independence stops being an abstract slogan and becomes a transmitted habit.

Ayla agrees, and adds an observation about Pakistan that she has been turning over since she was seventeen: there is no cultural equivalent of the American teenager who works at McDonald’s or Starbucks. The first taste of paying for your own groceries, of handing your mother pocket money instead of receiving it, is, she says, “such a freeing feeling.” Her pitch to other parents is simple: a kid does not need a nine-to-five to learn this. Tutoring, monetising a skill, anything that puts a small amount of independent income in their hands earlier rather than later.

Menstrual hygiene, and the meal-or-a-pack tradeoff

The conversation’s most substantive section is the one Ayla flags as the work she is proudest of. In ninth grade she sat through a two-and-a-half-hour talk by Jibran Nasir at her school, Lynx, about the Bagh-e-Sundus bomb blast and the relief work that followed. She did not blink for two and a half hours. She left convinced that one person can move the needle on a single problem, and that the problem she wanted to move was menstrual hygiene awareness.

The numbers she encountered while doing her research are the part Muzamil holds the conversation on. A pack of sanitary napkins, at the time, cost roughly the price of a family meal. The choice was binary. “A woman has to choose between feeding her household or buying a pack of sanitary napkins,” Ayla says. “And the choice would always be family first.” From there, two further problems compound: a culture of self-care that does not extend to women, and a complete absence of public conversation that would let girls and young women learn the basics of their own bodies.

Her organisation started small — donation drives, sanitary napkin distribution as part of ration drops — because showing up at a low-income colony and announcing herself as the menstrual hygiene educator was not going to work. The pads went out as a free monthly package alongside the rations, so the household budget did not have to absorb them. She is clear, though, that this is not the right scale for the problem. The right scale is government intervention, and not just at women — at men too, who carry half of the stigma. She points approvingly at the breast cancer awareness push that ran on Pakistani phone networks in October as an example of what a national-platform awareness campaign can do when someone chooses to do one.

Muzamil pulls the economics apart at her invitation. Imported pads carry freight cost, customs duty, and a wholesaler chain — the same reason a bag of Cheetos in Pakistan does not cost eight hundred rupees in its country of origin. Localisation of manufacturing is the obvious lever. Reusable cloth pads exist, Ayla notes, but the hygiene questions around them are real, and the disease load they can introduce ends up costing public health more than they save households. Menstrual cups are sanitary and cheap over their lifetime, but in a culture where a tampon is still associated with the loss of virginity, the cup is not arriving any time soon. Her conclusion is the one most policy people land on eventually: phase one is awareness, and economics has to come after.

Lynx, Model UNs, and why local debate turned toxic

Ayla traces her ability to hold a conversation like this one back to her school. Lynx is small — her 2019 graduating class was twenty-three students — and it did not have an A-level program, so she moved to Lyceum. What Lynx did have was an early debate and Model UN pipeline. She started in fifth grade and represented Pakistan at a Model UN in Switzerland on a Food and Agriculture Organization committee while she was still in middle school. By eleventh grade she had won Best Delegate at Cambridge MUN in Jordan.

International debating, in her telling, was diplomacy. Pakistani debating was something else. “Pakistani debate is toxic,” she says, and is willing to defend the sentence. Preconceived rivalries between schools — Lyceum versus Grammar versus Karachi Grammar versus Nixor — replaced the substance of the topic with strategy against the team in the next chair. The point of the exercise stopped being persuasion and started being how to beat that team specifically.

The cost for women was higher. Ayla describes one conference at which she had four or five incidents in which a boy from another school positioned himself uncomfortably close to her at the table while writing something. When she raised it, action was taken, but she is clear about the structural problem: the default assumption was that a Lyceum debater calling out a boy from another school was angling for points. Most girls, she says, do not have the confidence to push back, and so the incidents stay unreported. Her love for debating, she says without rancour, deteriorated in A-levels for exactly this reason.

Staring, safety, and the room you cannot leave

Muzamil opens the next question — generally as a woman, how do you feel in Pakistan? — and Ayla answers with two recent incidents rather than an abstraction. That morning she had been at a visa appointment, fully covered, mask on, and a man stared at her without break for thirty minutes. She did not make a scene because she did not want to lose her appointment. A fortnight earlier, at a Karachi petrol pump, with her hair and makeup done for a shoot, a man at the counter stared at her until she turned around, asked him directly what the problem was, and watched him panic.

Her conclusion is the one Muzamil keeps trying to surface throughout the episode. “It’s not about the apparel. It’s not about the way you look. It’s the mentality.” The example she reaches for is not a stranger at a petrol pump but Zahir Jaffer — an educated man from a well-resourced family who acted, she says, worse than an animal. The lesson she draws is that respect is not produced by education or by household income. It is produced inside a specific child’s head, in part by what is and is not corrected by the adults around him. “Boys will be boys” is a sentence she explicitly refuses. “Boys can be men. Men are respectful. Boys at times are not.”

The most uncomfortable example she gives is from her own balcony. Her neighbours used to be a family. After COVID, the house became a bachelor pad of twenty men. She stepped onto her balcony to look at the sky, glanced over, and counted fifteen men staring back. “I didn’t feel safe in my own house, and that is something that I think no one should feel.”

The MeToo question Muzamil is genuinely torn on

Muzamil flags his own ambivalence honestly. He believes the call-out culture that came with MeToo has done real work — he is one of the people whose social capital was rearranged by it — but he also worries about the witch-hunt risk, and about false accusations as a category, because as a man on the other side of an accusation he has no clean defence either.

Ayla does not dismiss the worry. She has called people out herself, including a friend of five or six years whom she blocked the day a survivor’s post went up. She talks about the difficulty of holding that decision — judging the friendships, questioning every prior intention, walking around with the antennas up. But the empirical change she has seen in her own male friends is what she keeps coming back to. “Empathetic people are less than five percent,” she says, and the fact that she can now count guys in her circle who genuinely empathise — not perform sympathy — is, to her, the trickle-down working.

Muzamil offers a framing she accepts. The boys who used to be primed by Bollywood and by adult social cues to imitate the “bad boys” — because the bad boys were the ones the attention seemed to flow toward — are now operating in a society where the bad boys’ social capital has collapsed. The incentive has flipped. He is not certain it will hold. Ayla thinks it will.

Self-awareness, privilege, and the gray space

By the end of the conversation they have arrived, almost incidentally, at the same conclusion from two different directions. Ayla talks about classmates with the kind of financial security that lets them coast through UK universities partying instead of studying, who are uninterested in stepping out of the box because the box already pays. The diagnosis she lands on is not greed. It is a lack of self-awareness about their own privilege.

She closes on something more personal. She used to be someone who would say the negative opinion the moment she had it, because being vocal felt like the honest choice. Now she thinks twice. “Is it worth saying?” The shift is not toward dishonesty, she clarifies — it is toward learning to agree to disagree, toward seeing the gray space between black and white. “Understanding that gray space is what helps you achieve peace.”

Muzamil wraps at the one-hour mark. Ayla is leaving soon for university, the work will keep happening on the side, and the questions Muzamil did not get to are filed away for a second conversation he flags openly he wants to have.